Creation of a Nation | Launching the “DevNation” Open Source, Polyglot Developer Conference

Over the past several years, I’ve enjoyed the privilege of peddling my projects at conferences the world over. Honestly, I’ve always had a healthy portion of cognitive dissonance concerning my role as a podium junkie; while even the best tech in the world is useless if no one knows about it, clamoring to an audience over the merits of your stuff can feel plain “icky”.

In an effort to quell some of my inner conflict, I adopted a very simple axiom. I use conferences to catalyze future work; both my own and of those attending my sessions.

With my recent move out of Engineering and into the Business Unit at JBoss, I’m now in a position to apply this theme a bit more broadly. A few short weeks ago we kicked off an internal effort at Red Hat to cultivate a new software conference, a unification and expansion of individual events we’ve had in the past (e.g. JUDCon, CamelOne, Developer Exchange). Our modus operandi:

Grow open source

Cater to a highly-technical audience of software and maintenance engineers

Extend our reach to communities outside Red Hat’s sphere of influence

Today I’m proud to announce the public site launch and call for papers for DevNation: an open source, polyglot conference for application developers and maintainers.

I will be pulling from my own experience to curate a relevant and beneficial week for our inaugural attendees. You should leave us inspired, motivated, and eager to apply new tools with which you’ve been recently armed.

Potential speakers: give us your best. We have no formal tracks; relieving ourselves of “theme quotas” will allow us to select the most compelling content overall. If your project is being used in modern application development, we want you to make a case for presenting to the citizens of DevNation.

In the coming weeks I’ll release more details as they’re solidified. For now, we’re proud to welcome the following Featured Speakers:

ALR

Open-source engineer; Developer Advocate and Program Manager at JBoss by Red Hat, author of the upcoming "Continuous Enterprise Development in Java" from O'Reilly Media. Founder of the ShrinkWrap project and recovering member of the JBoss Core Development Team.